Thursday, April 09, 2009

Why are butterflies so beautiful?

How does evolution explain the glorious patterning? Is there something in DNA that knows exactly how to place a line? It's not just butterflies, many plants and animals have lines and colours that seem designed for "aesthetic" effect. How on earth can that be encoded? - there simply isn't enough coding potential in the DNA system we're supposed to credit for it. How on earth, I repeat, can a plate full of amino acids resolve themselves not just into little robots, but into aesthetically drawn lines and colours, as well as living, wriggling, flitting, galloping creatures that put any imaginable battery power and programming completely nowhere by comparison. You can take any combination of chemicals you like and place them on any planet you like for however many million years, and you can pretty well guarantee that if you could come back in a billion years they'd still be sitting where you left them. They just don't do anything.

I say there isn't enough coding potential in the number of genes and the four-letter DNA combinations to program a decent business sales ledger. There certainly isn't enough to program an operating system. However there may be enough to encode variations, which are then interpreted by a separate operating system, i.e. "life". I know a bit about programming, and I know a bit about the numbers of genes and the coding system of DNA. I know that the sequences encode different amino acids. So far all you have created is a chemical soup. Where is the constructional dynamic? I mean literally where: locate it, identify it, describe how it operates. All you see is one cell become two etc and it all turns into a human being or a banana tree, grows and reproduces itself. Chemicals do not behave that way. They tend to chaos left to themselves, on the entropic principle. My pet dog has lines like Tutankhamun's mascara-type lines from his eyes and layers of different kinds of fur with gorgeously delineated boundaries and coloration. I'm not a creationist, I'm simply wondering what really is happening, the same as everyone else is, scientists and ordinary people alike. Scientists are ordinary people in their spare time, I know. And ordinary people are scientists in their spare time. But dogmatists have no spare time - they are too busy chasing their tails (the tails of their dogmas).

Our present understanding of life, from a scientific point of view, is somewhere between the giant turtle that carries the world on its back (DNA) and the Keplerian level of cosmology (it appears to explain some things). The next insight will be something revolutionary, as revolutionary as the theories of relativity, quantum mechanics and evolution. It will be denounced as incredible, like all breakthroughs. It is within touching distance and all it needs is fresh thinking and research. The scientific establishment always thinks the pre-revolutionary system is correct. I'm not talking about incremental discoveries, I'm talking about new analyses on a par with relativity, that will make our lego-like DNA theory seem like what it is, an excellent first step towards a door that is not open yet, beyond which we have not yet seen but which is easily opened. Our present generation will look just like all the previous worthy old duffers, who thought that the sun went around the earth and then that time was absolute etc.

There is an unvarying part of the cell, the mitochondrial DNA. I don't know if this could be the archetype and the rest of the DNA the variations, the measurements and specifications for the suit. Again there appears to be too little coding potential and still no "active principle".

Another good analogy of where we are with science is that we are like babies who see colours and shapes, call them "goo goo" and try to touch and taste them. What they signify we haven't even the foggiest notion.

Great website. I never thought I'd find a website that appreciated the strange intensity of Willesden sunsets. It sounds ridiculous to say you don't see them anywhere else - but it's true isn't it?
- Zadie Smith (comments)

Despite your outrageous heightism, I would be very happy to take up your case with the Council...
- The Rt. Hon. Sarah Teather MP, Brent East
(Dear Feargal)

As you know yourself, the quest for form - the search for the voice and scale necessary to what one wishes to say
- is the primary effort of writing. This may lead one into novel writing at one point, and into the writing of sonnets later on
- rather as Beethoven confined himself almost exclusively to the string quartet after finishing the Op 125 symphony.
- Rana Dasgupta (Dear Feargal)

a note from Red Woodward

We have asked our columnists time and again only to post stories that are not not untrue, but frankly it would be easier to train monkeys. Please tell us if we have inadvertently hit on something not not true, and we will uncorrect it. (Ed.)

the wisdom of Red Woodward

"Never trust anybody honest."

"This whole everybody dying malarkey has got beyond a joke."

"One of these days you'll hear that I died. That's what I'll miss, hearing all the news."

"What a person says a lot about says a lot about a person."

"Minimalism is the biggest load of crap ever."

"There's no such thing as waiting. You are either doing something useful or you are doing something useless."

"Meditation? It's a racket."

"You can put me in a box when I pop my clogs but not before."

"Evidently I'm past my sell by date but not my use by date."

"In life, you either do something and feel guilty about it, or do nothing and feel guilty about it. There is no in-between."

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